JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS最新文献

This paper offers a critique of Pierre Hadot's idea of philosophy as a way of life with reference to ancient China, particularly the Zhuangzi. The prevailing scholarly emphasis in philosophy as a way of life falls too heavily on individual will and effortful exertion—thus Hadot's description of what he calls “spiritual exercises.” I argue for counterbalancing the focus on effortful self-cultivation with attention to the role of passivity, receptiveness, and chance in the good life—collectively termed “grace.” After a discussion of the overemphasis on effort in self-cultivation, I turn to the Zhuangzi as an illustrative source of the importance of grace.

It is intuitive to think that divine transcendence is incompatible with the sacredness of nature, especially when transcendence is combined with the idea that God alone is valuable. Divine transcendence seems to demote this-worldly values in favor of union with God in a disembodied afterlife. Divine transcendence also seems to legitimize hierarchies, including male–female and human-nature hierarchies. Divine immanence seems a better alternative. This set of intuitions about transcendence appears regularly in the field of Religion and Ecology, sometimes as an implicit backdrop rather than an explicit position. This backdrop needs to be thematized and evaluated. For those with ecological concerns, divine transcendence and divine immanence need not be mutually exclusive. Rather, divine transcendence (understood non-contrastively) complements divine immanence and is compatible with both animist and polytheist cosmologies. The extent of this mutual compatibility and its importance for environmental concerns has yet to be fully articulated.

This essay offers a Kierkegaardian analysis of and response to the harmful effects of destabilization that can be caused by engaging with certain technological media. It argues that the intellectual technological ethic that is at work in social media platforms reflects two types of despair discussed in Søren Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death. It advises using a Kierkegaard-inspired Socratic rhetorical strategy of communication that ironically employs technology for depicting this despair and awakening individuals to its presence in their lives. Moreover, this essay suggests that the edifying themes of “misery” and “guilt” can be communicated indirectly and thereby offer one  intervention that could possibly help the current technological age move from the immediate aesthetic sphere of existence to the religious sphere. Considering the important role of upbuilding in Kierkegaard's oeuvre, the final portion explores how even someone who does not identify with a religious tradition or community may encounter what Kierkegaard terms the paradox of the eternal in time in ways that foster the development of authentic selfhood.

Barnett responds to three articles that put the thought of Søren Kierkegaard in conversation with modern popular media. He argues that each of these pieces demonstrates that Kierkegaard's criticism of the burgeoning free press remains relevant today, particularly in the areas of journalistic practice, mental health, and political responsibility. At the same time, however, Barnett wonders if the radical nature of the Dane's critique has been fully considered. For Kierkegaard, in other words, it is not just that popular media have flaws in need of correction; it is that the media constitute “the evil principle in the modern world.”

Søren Kierkegaard was engaged with the press in a variety of ways throughout his authorship. Although studies of Kierkegaard's interactions with the public press of his time have largely focused on his dispute with the satirical newspaper, Corsaren, in this paper I examine his first engagement with the press—a mostly anonymous newspaper dispute with the Danish social activist, Orla Lehmann, about the freedom of the press in Denmark—as a lens through which to understand his thoughts on the press in general, on anonymous authorship in the newspapers and otherwise, and the ethical and religious significance Kierkegaard sees in the methods we employ, including anonymity, when we engage one another in public writings.

According to Arti Dhand, it can be argued that all Indian ethics have been primarily virtue ethics. Many have indeed jumped on the virtue bandwagon, providing prima facie interpretations of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist canons in virtue terms. Others have expressed firm skepticism, claiming that virtues are not proven to be grounded in the nature of things and that, ultimately, the appeal to virtue might just well be a mere façon de parler. In this paper, we aim to advance the discussion of Indian virtue ethics. Our intent is not to provide a catch-all interpretation of the different Indian schools. Our goal is, more modestly, to offer a theory of virtues in Indian philosophies, as a framework for theorists and interpreters who see these diverse traditions as amenable to systematic virtue analysis. Our theory grounds virtues in the reality of genuine moral dispositions and in a system of beliefs where morality is understood as transformative in nature.